Entirely

Mary Fedden

Entirely

If we could get the hang of it entirely
It would take too long;
All we know is the splash of words in passing
and falling twigs of song,
And when we try to eavesdrop on the great
Presences it is rarely
That by a stroke of luck we can appropriate
Even a phrase entirely.

If we could find our happiness entirely
In somebody else's arms
We should not fear the spears of the spring nor the city's
Yammering fire alarms
But, as it is, the spears each year go through
Our flesh and almost hourly
Bell or siren banishes the blue
Eyes of Love entirely.

And if the world were black or white entirely
And all the charts were plain
Instead of a mad weir of tigerish waters,
A prism of delight and pain,
We might be surer where we wished to go
Or again we might be merely
Bored but in the brute reality there is no
Road that is right entirely.

Louis MacNeice



MacNeice’s  poem suits my current train of thought well. We want answers. We want to know why and how and who. We think this plus that equals such-and-such.Everything must or should be knowable, understandable, comprehensible. We think the "information" we have is correct, we believe if we know the "facts" we will be strong, we will be better, we can be prepared for things to come. But all that is illusion. We are truly in "a mad weir of tigerish waters, a prism of delight and pain". And it's okay. It is wildly reductive to think that we know much of anything, or understand what the "facts" mean. Learning to ask questions, new questions, recurring questions, questions within questions - this is the way to live. There is grace in exploration, in searching, in waiting for things to become clearer, clear enough for deeper quests. MacNeice writes so eloquently of learning to accept the partiality of our existence. It's a relinquishment of ego, it seems to me, a recognition of aweful compexities that are yet and may always be beyond us. Knowing we don't know is a good thing, it is much easier to learn from that position than from the position of believing we have the answers.